民意的形成与政治社会化

在政治生活中,几乎每一个领域和具体问题上都充斥着各种各样的态度和意见.这些态度和意见从哪里来,是民意研究领域的一个常见问题,而从政治社会化的视角寻找民意来源,则是民意研究的一个重要内容.其中,家庭、学校、时代与生命周期的影响,既代表着不同的民意来源,也反映了早期社会化阶段民意形成过程中情感变量与信息变量的不同影响.在民意的形成过程中,情感变量与信息变量在持续产生影响,其影响在生命周期的不同阶段也在持续发生变化.     

The Mostly-Sovereign People: Sophisticated Voting and Public Opinion About Term Limits in California

This study finds that citizens are capable of purposeful issue and sophisticated voting in referendum elections. These conclusions are drawn from an analysis of the 1990 vote for term limits in California. As theory suggests, the voting public in California does not live up to some idealized picture of decision makers with complete information, but rather they rely on partisan cues and their own underlying policy preferences to help decide on a voting strategy for term limits. This suggests that voters are capable of making complex and sophisticated choices about politics. If problems exist with the current system of initiative and referendum in California, the problems are not endemic but are found in the implementation of this particular version of direct democracy.     

Public Opinion, Political Communication and the Internet

In contemporary society public opinion is generally mediated by the mass media, which has come to encompass the Habermasian 'public sphere'. This arena is now characterised by the conflict between market and democratic principles, by competing interests of politicians and the media. The presentation of information for debate becomes distorted. The opinion of the 'public' is no longer created through deliberation, but is constructed through systems of communication, in conflict with political actors, who seek to retain control of the dissemination of information. The expansion of the internet as a new method of communication provides a potential challenge to the primacy of the traditional media and political parties as formers of public opinion.     

APSA Organized Sect. 32: Elections,Public Opinion,and Voting Behavior Invites Nominations and Applications for Editor of Political Behavior

Political Behavior -     

Australia's Political Institutions and the Corruption of Public Opinion1

This article explores structural causes for the decline in the quality of Australia's political and policy conversations. Three are nominated. The first concerns the changing role of the major party organisations. These no longer contribute to agenda setting; they are no longer forums for activist and interest mobilisation; they no longer mobilise and cue a mass base. The second structural change concerns the rise in the role of the media. This is now the primary bridge between the formal political system and the surrounding society, a role for which it is singularly ill‐equipped. The third change concerns the misalignment between the formal political system and Australian society. The formal system was formed in the early twentieth century when Australian society was broadly divided by class allegiance. Those days are long gone. Class has decomposed. A variety of new concerns differentiate and pluralise social attitudes. Possible remedies are then discussed.     

The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen's Speech in the United Kingdom

This article represents the effect of public opinion on government attention in the form of an error-correction model where public opinion and policymaking attention coexist in a long-run equilibrium state that is subject to short-run corrections. The coexistence of policy-opinion responsiveness and punctuations in political attention is attributed to differences in theoretical conceptions of negative and positive feedback, differences in the use of time series and distributional methods, and differences in empirical responsiveness of government to public attention relative to responsiveness to public preferences. This analysis considers time-series data for the United Kingdom over the period between 1960 and 2001 on the content of the executive and legislative agenda presented at the start of each parliamentary session in the Queen's Speech coded according to the policy content framework of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and a reconstituted public opinion dataset on Gallup's "most important problem" question. The results show short-run responsiveness of government attention to public opinion for macroeconomics, health, and labor and employment topics and long-run responsiveness for macroeconomics, health, labor and employment, education, law and order, housing, and defense .     

监督舆论与舆论监督:网络公民权利与公共权力的进退与平衡

监督舆论与舆论监督是话语干涉的两种形式,存在主体性、结果性、立场性、技术性的权力差异。监督舆论形成公共权力的积极进制、消极进制、无效进制,引导舆论朝着积极正向的方向发展,但也易造成舆论的说教化与虚假化。舆论监督形成公共权力的强制化、主动化、圈层化、边缘化的退制,适应公意的变化,提倡公民权利约束公共权力,保证权力运行的合法化与公开化,存在舆论控制权力的风险,出现群体审判与群氓政治的现象。监督舆论与舆论监督应达到有限性平衡、动态性平衡、有效性平衡、竞争性平衡,保证公共权力与公民权利的相互制衡,达到善治的目的,进而实现公共权力与舆论机制的优化,促进社会现代化的和谐发展。     

Voting on Europe: The Potential Pitfalls of a British Referendum

As Britain prepares for a possible referendum on continued membership of the European Union, it is essential that more careful thought is paid to the dynamics of referendums. Polling data reveal the existence of a substantial knowledge deficit in the UK and other parts of the EU: large numbers of voters simply do not understand the EU. There is also reason to question the conventional view that voters can correct for such a deficit by using cues from opinion leaders and the media. The experience of recent referendums in other EU member states suggests that many voters will take part in the proposed British referendum without independent and informed knowledge of the issues at stake, that many will have been swayed by partisan elite opinion, and that many will decide on the basis of their views about domestic politics rather than their views about Europe.     

Effects of Public Opinion and Political System Characteristics on State Policy Outputs

Rather than competing with socioeconomic variables as directdeterminants of state policy, political system characteristicsmay operate as mediating factors that either facilitate or impedethe translation of constituency preferences into policy. Inthis study, the state opinion liberalism index presented byGerald Wright, Robert Erikson, and John Mclver is incorporatedin multiplicative regression models as a measure of citizenpreferences to address this theoretical reformulation. Althoughpervasive empirical corroboration is not found for the reconceptualizedrole for political variables, political system characteristicsdo demonstrate significant effects on state policy. In addition,suggesting that public officials responddirectly to citizenpreferences, evidence ispresentedon democratic representationwithin the states.     

The Conditional Nature of Presidential Responsiveness to Public Opinion

How does public opinion affect presidential policymaking? We address this issue by testing a diverse set of hypotheses with data concerning a set of individual policies across time. In particular, the data revolve around presidential budgetary proposals on a set of major policy issues for which there are recurring surveys on citizens' preferences over spending. The analysis suggests that presidents are more responsive to mass opinion on issues that are familiar to citizens in their everyday lives. Also, for reelection‐seeking presidents, responsiveness is shown to depend upon two key political factors. First, presidents are more responsive to public opinion when the next election is imminent. Second, the effect of presidential popularity is nonmonotonic; presidents with average approval ratings are most likely to adopt policy positions congruent with public opinion, whereas presidents with approval ratings that are significantly above or below average have the greatest propensity to take unpopular positions.     

Opinion Research and the Counter-Revolution in American Political Science

The identity of political science, its tenuous orthodoxies and continuing divisions, is bound up with its history. The historical subject of this essay is the rise of one particular orthodoxy, the socio-psychological model of opinion research and voting behaviour originally associated with the University of Michigan. This rise helps constitute a conservative defence of American liberal democracy in the early cold war, owing much to the peculiar politics of that era. The contemporary payoff of this historical reconstruction is an identification of the vulnerabilities and invulnerabilities of the model as highlighted by its struggles with the understandings it superseded and the contingent political context of these struggles. The substantial legacy for the discipline as a whole merits careful critical scrutiny, especially given changes in the political context since the 1950s, and the end of the cold war.     

The Unanimous Voting Rule is not the Political Equivalent to Market Exchange

The unanimous voting rule is often viewed as analogous tovoluntary market exchange. This paper demonstrates that whenthird-party pecuniary effects exist, this analogy breaks downbecause unlike markets, unanimous voting requires compensationfor these effects. Thus, efficient market outcomes typically willbe rejected by the unanimous voting rule. Even when transactionscosts are low enough to make compensation feasible, the political outcome under unanimity will differ from the market outcome. The distributional effects of unanimityprovide the incentive for people to substitute rent-seekingbehavior for productive activity, and reduce the incentive forproductive change, providing additional reasons why a less-than-unanimous voting rule may be optimal when resources are to beallocated politically.     

Western Political Research Approaches and the Development of Political Science Methodology in China

The restoration and development of political science as a discipline in China since 1980 benefits from its methodological improvements that were made largely by introducing research approaches from western academia. The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of the introduction based on articles published in Chinese academic journals since 1990. There exists a wide diversity in research approaches in political science, and the authors try to explain why each approach has a different impact on Chinese political studies and how the introduction of such knowledge has changed the way Chinese political researchers understand the methodology and political science as a discipline.

The Epistemic Value of Public Opinion: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Abstract

This paper discusses the claim that citizens lack sufficient political knowledge to make sound judgements on public matters. It is contended that practical judgements raise essentially two types of claims, namely a claim to empirical truth and a claim to normative rightness, and that there are good reasons to believe that people's insufficient political knowledge undermines both of them. Yet, an examination of the dynamics of public opinion formation reveals that there is an epistemic potential in public opinion, though it is dependent upon the quality of public debate. Building on this idea and on the concept of deliberative responsiveness, two paths of political reform are proposed, which should illustrate the practical implications of the theoretical argument made in this paper by demonstrating how the quality of public debate and, thus, the epistemic value of public opinion could be enhanced.